The sublimity of three hundred words a day and a friend
Alternate clickbait title: the foolproof trick that helped me finish my novel, plus a template
In the fall of 2022, I lived alongside a small but paralyzing guilt. My life was otherwise quite lovely and objectively high-achieving: I was a few months into a relaxing-yet-stimulating federal appellate clerkship, an early-career goal for many young attorneys. I worked only from 9am to 5pm, I ran the New York City marathon, and—above all—I had written 30,000 words of my manuscript.1
And yet. Since May, I had written the first 30,000 nearly all in one go. Now, absent any kind of discipline, I was stuck. I was haunted by the words of one of my good friends, a prolific and successful author, who told me she wrote 1,000 words a day. With this benchmark in mind, my daily output dwindled to zero; I felt guilty for not writing more; I felt guilty when I opened the document; I thus dreaded opening the document; I wrote nothing. The guilt was particularly painful because I sensed that I was capable of finishing the manuscript and yet I could not accomplish the daily task apparently required to do so.
On a wintry midwestern night, I confessed these shortcomings to a new friend over Chinese hand-pulled noodles. She herself was an aspiring writer who also was not currently writing but wanted to begin a novel.2 She said: “Let’s do it together.”
That night she sent me a shared Google document. What I saw astonished me: she had not planned for us to write 1,000 words a day, which I had internalized as necessary and good practice. Instead, she had plugged the following math at the top:
Six days a week, with one day off;
300 words a day; and
A weekly goal of 1800 words a week.
Damn, I thought, That seems low. That’s like three paragraphs.
I also thought: At this point, I’ll try anything.
So I did it. She did it. We stuck with it. We diligently logged our daily words, mostly writing 300-words-a-day, often writing more, sometimes rushing over the weekends to hit 1800 words if we’d been derelict during the workweek. Below each of our little trackers, we left links to craft posts that inspired us or links to interviews from writers we loved. We left hundreds on hundreds of comments cheering each other on and commenting on the linked inspiration.
And exactly fifty-two weeks later, I had completed my manuscript, gone through multiple rounds of revision, and received my first agent offer. Sixteen weeks after that, my friend completed her first manuscript draft at 73K words.
Why this approach is sublime (for me)
Three hundred words a day is eminently doable. Many people write a thousand words a day. Good for them! But a thousand words a day is the best day of my whole life, especially given my full time job. A thousand words a day is rare and unexpected and astonishing. But my psychological anchoring to a thousand words a day held me back, precisely because it is a reach number. It was easy to go all-or-nothing: There is no way I will write a thousand words today, therefore I will not try to write at all.
By contrast, my favorite running podcaster
says, “Make it easy to get over the starting line.” Three hundred words is easy enough to get over the starting line. I mean, that’s like three paragraphs. It was easy to convince myself to write three hundred words, even when I was drop-dead tired. On tough days, I wrote three hundred words on my phone before bed or standing in line at the DMV. Three hundred words is nothing to scoff at, either, because at that rate within a year you’d have a full 80,000-word first draft.But three hundred words is long enough to get into a flow. After writing three hundred, I could easily convince myself to write a hundred or two hundred words more. I often discovered something about my novel while there. Those discoveries were magic.
You can easily catch up to the weekly goal, which makes it easy to avoid the all-or-nothing mindset. The weekly goal is only 1800 words, which you can easily hit over the weekend if you’ve been negligent all week. (I mean, some overachievers do a that in under two days.) That easy macro goal kept us going; if we missed a day we wouldn’t fall off the wagon and quit all together. Our comments say as much. Make it up on Saturday, we wrote to each other. Made it by the skin of my teeth, I added.
A friend holds you accountable. It was much easier to keep going when I saw my friend in the doc, adding up her numbers. It felt motivated to hit my weekly goal so that I wouldn’t fall behind or let her down. It was exciting to see what new inspiration she’d pasted into the weekly inspiration section. I looked forward to our little notes. I read craft essays each day that I wouldn’t have read if she hadn’t sent them to me.
How it changed my life
Since beginning this Google Doc, we’ve repeatedly pasted in this quote from a running newsletter that I love:
[Arthur Brooks talks] about love not as a feeling, but as a commitment. “To like is to feel,” Brooks says. “To love is to decide.” I found this to be incredibly profound and applicable to so many areas of life: relationships, work, running, and more. It doesn’t matter how you feel on a given day—if you’ve made the decision to love someone or something then you’ve committed to showing up every day. This takes discipline. Because if you gave into how you felt every day, the relationship would fall apart, you’d skip the run, nothing would ever get done, and life would be reactive, fleeting, and unstable.
Our three hundred words a day changed our life. It taught us what it feels like to truly love writing, to commit to it daily. It taught us about how to build a practice from the smallest of building blocks. It taught us that we don’t need a huge outlay to count as writers, that we are not lazy when we can’t do it every day, and that we can always try again tomorrow. That thirty minutes at bedtime, sometimes, is enough. That it doesn’t have to be too hard, really.
Because maybe one day you wake up and you have a full draft and maybe an agent and maybe a book deal but mostly you have something that is all yours, that you chose day after day and week after week. And because you had a friend to do it alongside you, you were never alone.
As for us: we have not stopped filling in the Google Doc. We are at Year Two, Week Twenty. I plan on not stopping until one of us dies, until I cannot type, until the sun’s a foul black tire fire. I wish the same for you.
Sincerely,
Nina
What I’m Enjoying
This video on why Dua Lipa is one of the best literary interviewers out there, actually
This old overheard from Steven Soderbergh talking about money, filmmaking, and cinema (which totally applies to publishing as well)
This paragraph isn’t to brag! I think what I’m trying to say is that among every artist I’ve met, it’s possible to have so many accomplishments in one’s life: beautiful children, a lovely family, a thriving career, great friends, and to still be set askew the enormity of the act of creating art.
In a similar vein, I took author David Kadavy’s 100 words a day challenge. And also found that challenging until I found my rhythm.
They say habits require 66 days of repetition to become more effortless…but everyone is different.
Bottom line, reps is the key 😊
hey this was awesome to read - thank you. I love that target number. seems so approachable but also substantial, and also I see how it could get you into a flow state and keep you going past that! thanks for sharing!